Panel hands Obama US surveillance report: official

‘UNIQUE ROLE’:The study reportedly recommends the continuation of government surveillance programs, but with the addition of some revisions to safeguard privacy

AFP, WASHINGTON

A review panel handed US President Barack Obama a report on Friday on surveillance by US spy agencies following explosive revelations on vast phone and Internet sweeps by fugitive US whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

The report contains more than 40 recommendations the White House will consider, and Obama is to deliver a speech on the subject after a full-scale review of US eavesdropping activity concludes next month, US National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.

The report is said to recommend a continuation of US National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs, which have alarmed US allies and civil liberties groups, but with some new privacy safeguards.

The White House is to study the five-man panel’s work and decide which recommendations to adopt, which need further study, and which to discarded, officials said.

The report looks at how Washington can use its intelligence capability to guard national security while maintaining public trust.

Obama said last week that he would introduce some restraints on the NSA following the review.

A flurry of intelligence leaks from Snowden, currently in temporary asylum in Russia, lifted the lid on a vast global spying network.

Tens of thousands of documents leaked by Snowden to the Guardian and other media outlets have detailed the scope of the NSA’s shadowy activities.

Snowden’s revelations show that the NSA has systematically raked in metadata and information from millions of e-mails and phone calls, some of it about US citizens.

The leaks have provided a rolling embarrassment for the White House and damaged US national security, while the scale of the eavesdropping has shocked and angered US allies.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, in excerpts of an interview to be aired today, said he could guarantee that “neither the president nor I believe that some of this gathering of information that has taken place in very particular instances and against particular high-level personnel is appropriate.”

“I think the president will speak to that very clearly in the days ahead,” he told Andres Oppenheimer of CNN en Espanol.

The New York Times reported that the review panel would recommend making public the privacy protections foreign citizens can expect when the NSA gathers their phone or Internet records.

Separately, a US official said the White House had also decided to maintain the “dual-hatted” arrangement that sees a single military officer head the NSA eavesdropping service and US cyberwarfare operations.

The Wall Street Journal said the task force would recommend that records of phone calls held by the NSA after the massive data mining operations should be held by telephone companies and not the spy agency.

The Times reported that the review panel would recommend that top White House officials directly examine the list of foreign leaders whose communications are monitored by the NSA.

The protection is to be introduced following revelations that US spies eavesdropped on the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the communications of other world leaders.

The Times also said that the White House review would create a corps of lawyers who would argue against NSA attorneys over espionage operations in the existing US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Some critics of the “dual-hatted” system of leadership for the NSA and the military’s cyberwarfare command had argued the arrangement puts too much power in the hands of one person.